Sunday 27 February 2011

Bayou Chemistry

Here's my review from the latest Nightshift, which is fresh on the shelves this weekend. I'm keeping my reviews pretty much down to 2 or so a month at the moment, as I have another writing project on the go. Probably not something for these pages, but it's shaping up quite well so far. Nice to be kept busy. Pissing it down out there, think I'll stay in my cosy study for a while.


THE BAYOU BROTHERS, The Famous Monday Blues, Bullingdon Arms, 7/2/11


We’ve seen some outstanding performances at The Famous Monday Blues over the years, along with some of the worst gigs ever. In the former category, some spotless musicians have treated the blues form as a lingua franca, using it to communicate ideas and emotions of great subtlety with a deft touch and original variations; in the latter, we find hordes of denim zombies ploughing through the same clunky rhythms, the same threadbare lyrics and the same crass wailing axe solos. With bad blues guitarists, a few simple things are repeated over and over, and quality is judged solely on how swiftly they do so. Is this art, or a game of bloody Tetris?

Thankfully, tonight these po-faced pentatonic widdlers are far away, as a righteous zydeco party is whipped up by The Bayou Brothers, a Louisiana Cajun band from San Diego (which is a little like a band from County Armagh called The Bleedin’ Bow Bell Cockneys, but never mind). Cajun music is a rough melange of black blues and French song, typified by fluent accordion passages and clattering rhythms played on metal washboards, and is one of those genres that always works so long as it’s played with enough conviction. And despite this being a Monday night with an average crowd that’s slow to thaw, the Bayou Brothers certainly can’t be criticised for a lack of energy, grinning their way through two invigorating sets, and regularly doling out spare washboards to audience members of varying rhythmic ability.

At their best the band’s evident enjoyment of the music is infectious, and their openness to random punters’ interventions reveals a relaxed unpretentiousness that makes us feel like we’re at a gig in some deep South commune. On the reverse, the band sadly has a taste in cheesy ersatz gestures, from the so-called “squeezebox” which is really a disguised Roland keyboard that needs nary a squeeze (basically the much maligned keytar resurrected for folkies), to the percussionist in the golden blouse who smiles manically throughout in a way that nobody does outside Disneyland without severe medication. Her “name our cute ‘gator” competition just about tips us over the edge. Do they have Butlins in California?

A straight cover of Ray Charles’ “Hallelujah I Love Her So” is generic, and perhaps without the zydeco sprit the band is no great shakes. But then again, who cares? For tonight, all too rarely at a blues gig, we’re not here to polish the traditions or venerate technical musos, we’re here to dance, drink and get lost in the clockwork hoedown of washboard blues...and on a cold Monday within the Bully’s ugly breezeblocks, a little escapism is no bad thing.

Tuesday 22 February 2011

I Can DJ Shit

There's something quite wonderful about a week off work, when you don't have any other plans. Yes, at first I was going to go away, but that fell through, and I was disappointed, but I'm getting loads done and seriously relaxing. Plus, it gives me time to write unplanned little reviews like this one. A fun night, and I hope Audiograft returns next year, but it did run the gamut from atrocious to sublime.


RHODRI DAVIES & MAX EASTLEY/ AUTOMATED NOISE ENSEMBLE/ STEPHEN CORNFORD & PAUL WHITTY/ JAMES KELLY/ SHIT! I CAN DJ, Audiograft, Modern Art Oxford, 19/2/11


Opening the final night of Oxford Brookes University’s Audiograft festival of sound art, the Shit! I Can DJ collective promise an experimental blind DJ set, in which nobody involved knows what the next segue is going to be. Hey, it’s aleatory! Anything could happen! Although, inevitably, all that does happen is that five self-satisfied hipsters chuckle smugly to each other as the Sylvanian Families theme plays infuriatingly over Archie Shepp, whilst the audience grows visibly restless.

By contrast, James Kelly’s problem is that his sounds are too consonant. Pressing your own themes, motives and textures onto vinyl and mixing them live is a neat idea, but if the sounds are too prettily open-ended there’s no challenge. Biosphere drones, Garbarek sax and Liz Fraser glossolalia sound pleasant together, but they’d sound equally pleasant in any configuration, and the long set soon becomes an unstructured stream of sugary, soporific segments: nice enough for a brief visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

Stephen Cornford & Paul Whitty’s “...it pays my way and it corrodes my soul...”, on the other hand, is conceptually strong and sonically captivating. Cornford places a vintage reel to reel machine onto a table, attaches two contact mikes, picks up a screwdriver, and proceeds to methodically dismantle it, whilst Whitty turns the whirrs, scrapes and bumps into powerful noise with a selection of FX and treatments, galvanic screeches and angry buzzing sounding like Merzbow eating a plate of bees. The arresting piece could be read as a satire on the fetishisation of vintage hardware, and it’s amusing to see people staring intently at a pair of pliers and some 50s technology, whilst rows of shiny Boss pedals across the table create the actual sounds. The conclusion is witty too, as Cornford tries desperately to cram all components back into the casing, like someone with an overstuffed holiday suitcase.

After this theatrical spectacle, the Automated Noise Ensemble’s lightly modified turntables seem unadventurous. Two decks are adorned with pieces of string that hit a contact strip every rotation, whilst another pair play scored vinyl to create a skein of clicks and skitters. It’s rhythmically enticing, occasionally evoking trains or horses’ hooves, but there’s not much that can be done once the rhythms have been built up, so perhaps the brief set duration was advisable.

Veteran instrument builder Max Eastley brings along a hinged plank of wood with a single bowed metal string, which allows him to bend notes to an extreme degree, even as they decay. The range of sounds he can create is truly astonishing, alternately aping a ‘cello, a clarinet and a swanee whistle and in one harrowing sequence, a wailing voice with ultra-portamento, the lament of the Hawaiian damned. Rhodri Davies takes an accompanist’s role, seemingly pathologically averse to plucking his harp. Instead he rubs it, tickles it with e-bows, taps it with soft mallets, and spends a while shaking it at different angles, like a man trying to retrieve a plectrum from an acoustic guitar. It’s a brilliantly intense, oppressive set of eerie Lynchian hums and ghostly glissandi, and even Eastley seems a little shocked by the unsettling atmosphere at the conclusion. Perhaps they were trying to eradicate the memory of the ill-conceived wackiness at the start of the evening.

Tuesday 15 February 2011

The Musician's A Prentice

The Doctor Who Decide Your Destiny series is atrocious. God, how hard can it be to do a Choose Your Own Adventure riff on the Dr? Who ever heard of a solo role play book where you can't bloody die? Rubbish.

I know, I should spend less time in charity shops.


BUG PRENTICE – Demo

“Ceilidh Dancer”, the opening track on this new set of demos tells of a man who “gave away the punchline” to a joke. To us that’s solid gold proof that Ally Craig doesn’t write autobiographically: if there’s one man we can’t imagine giving away the punchline to a joke, it’s Ally. Even when he’d got to the end of the joke, he’d keep the pay off secret, we imagine. So this is another selection of the mysterious, deeply intriguing little songs we’ve come to expect from Craig, with the addition of a rhythm section. Lyrically they’re as obtuse as his last batch, and musically they totter about always at the edge of over-balancing, like a girl trying out her Mum’s stilettos.

It takes a short while to get used to Ally with a noisy band, as we’re so used to his solo acoustic performances, but what we lose in intimacy we gain in intricacy, Ally’s wonderfully frail yet powerful voice flitting across “Ceilidh Dancer” like an injured insect, awkward yet still soaring. On “Nebraska Admiral” the vocals are even better, finding a space in the husky delivery between a dinky nursery rhyme and a yearning Broadway ballad – although he does rhyme “asking” with “Nebraskan”, which should probably be illegal.

If the band doesn’t add a huge amount to “Nebraska Admiral”, they sound fantastic on “Lovitz Vs Dick”, leaping up from a sedate intro to huge crunchy blocks of guitar that remind us unexpectedly of They Might Be Giants’ “Ana Ng”, then drifting back into a hazy lope, before the second half in which Ally’s chicken peck guitar strumming is underpinned by bouncy toms. Aside from sounding like a bad restaurant chain that specialises in kid’s parties and runny carbonara, “Chicago Baxters” is the only track that doesn’t wholly convince us as a composition, although we love the image it brings to mind of Sonic Youth playing a lounge ballad. If this were a random demo that had popped into the in box, we’d be pretty excited. As it is, judging from past experience, we can comfortably expect some more fantastic, elastic misshaped rock music from this outfit. The prentice work has been done, we’re waiting for the masterpiece, now.

Wednesday 2 February 2011

Yeth, Monkey, What Ith It?

Bit busy tonight, so no time to chat, I'm off out soon. I'm listening to the Royal Phil plays funk. It's great!


PIGTHE – WELCOME BACK TO VIRIDIAN (download)


Pigthe’s website contains little micro-stories about things like awkward conversations and trying to chat up women by asking what their favourite Pavement LP is. They’re well-written, but seem almost pathologically obsessed with not revealing anything. It must be hard to write prose when you’ve got all your fingers crossed behind your back.

And the music isn’t dissimilar. There’s a lot of quirky potential on this album, some dinky little tunes and a sense of fun encapsulated in antediluvian drum machine patterns, but Pigthe has gone as far as they can to obscure this fact, with wilfully lofi sound and aggressively unfinished arrangements. Oh, and lest we forget, there’s quite probably the worst use of auto-tune we’ve heard from a local act on this CD, opener “Carrion (Live)” – which is potentially a pleasing little Passenger-a-like ditty – turning each vocal cadence into the sound of the farmer leaping off a ladder in Chuckie Egg.

There are a whole raft of great things about this record – the melancholic guitar on “Fill In The Gaps”, the tiny guitar tickles on “Mephistopheles” that sound like Foals in a matchbox, the title “Hip Hop Saved My Life But Now It’s Killing Itself” – but overall the air is of an act that seems hellbent on hiding any quality behind fuzzy bedroom four track recording, perhaps in the paralysing fear that anybody might actually think they meant it. A track like “Any Other Name” is a perky nugget of pop somewhere between The Housemartins and The Wedding Present, and we truly wish that more of the record captured this sense of indie pop pleasure. Go on, Pigthe: you’ve got some talent here, stand up and go for it. Try to make something great, stop using whimsy and distance as a defence machanism. We think we could love this music, but only if Pigthe can learn to love it first.

Oh, and Pavement are shit, too.